Mr. Ned Costello:

The big imponderable is how the UK disengages from the EU Single Market, in particular in the context of the four freedoms, namely, the free movement of people, capital, goods and services. We still do not know how this will turn out. The free movement of people is the one I would highlight because of its relevance to research and it will be critical to see how the UK engages with EU research programmes. Switzerland made proposals to change its immigration system and that had an immediate effect on its relationship with the EU in terms of its participation in the framework.

The Chairman mentioned the 11,000 students from Ireland studying in the UK, which represents over 6% of our own domestic student population. It amounts to a small university or a couple of medium-sized ITs. As Professor MacCraith said, if there is a significant perturbation of those numbers there will be major implications for the plans arising from the Cassells report. The number of UK students coming to Ireland increased by 38% between 2012 and 2015, possibly because of the £9,000 fee in the UK. However, the most up-to-date data from UCAS in the UK show that in academic year 2017-2018 there was a 10% decrease in applications to Ireland from England, Scotland and Wales and a further 18% reduction in the number of Irish students applying to UK universities. There are tangible impacts already.

We do not have data for the number of UK staff in Irish universities but there is a common labour market between Ireland and the UK for academic staff so this is a concern. We have a portal, universityvacancies.com, for jobs in academia.

What we have seen from that is that there was a significant increase month on month last year relative to the year before in the number of people hitting that portal from the UK. People are definitely looking to Ireland. We know that there are 2,300 Irish staff working in the UK. The position of these staff is obviously a concern.

Those are some of the downsides. As for the upsides, I will echo the comments that people have made. With regard to international students, international education is a big focus of Ireland's education strategy. We are definitely seeing numbers, which are in my opening statement, reflecting a lessening of interest from international non-EU students in the UK. That is absolutely a potential opportunity for Ireland. Again, I echo what has been said by other colleagues here in that the capacity of the system is an issue.

We need to see this in the overall context and in a supportive environment for higher education. We need a system in which we address the systemic funding issues and in which we need more flexibility on the staffing and regulation side. I should mention that because the UK system is much less regulated than our system, particularly when it comes to the autonomy of institutions in how they manage staffing contracts, remuneration architecture and all of that. We need that as well. We need some improvement on the sort of nexus between the Garda National Immigration Bureau, GNIB, and the justice side of things in terms of stay-on opportunities for international students to capitalise on those students as well. We believe that a holistic package needs to be put together to capitalise fully on the opportunities and to counteract some of the very definite downsides that we can see emerging.